


convalescence

by dilkirani



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Season 2 AU, Tumblr Prompt, references through s5 finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 21:07:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16940742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilkirani/pseuds/dilkirani
Summary: For someone on Tumblr who requested: "An au where in 2x08 (2x09?) when Mack leaves fitzsimmons alone to talk, Jemma is the one who gets to explain herself first.""Jemma should be happy. Fitz is alive and, really, despite what he might think, he’s not so different from the Fitz he’s always been."





	convalescence

Jemma should be happy. Fitz is alive and, really, despite what he might think, he’s not so different from the Fitz he’s always been. His hand shakes and he stutters, especially if he’s agitated. He’s had to create new workarounds for tasks he’d perfected as a child. But she watches him in the lab—from her periphery, so she can pretend he wouldn’t avoid her gaze. She listens to him laughing with Mack. The curiosity, the silly jokes, the grumpiness, the compassion—it’s wonderfully, wholly Fitz. Not the same Fitz she thought she was rescuing, nor the same Fitz she cried over for nine days, bargaining and begging and sometimes raging. Not even the same Fitz she had tried and failed to help. _People change_ , she wants to tell him. _Maybe yours was a more drastic change, but we’re all different. That doesn’t mean we can’t still be FitzSimmons, if you’d just let us._

Maybe the problem was they had always been codependent, allowing themselves to grow together as if her poisoned roots wouldn’t infect him eventually. It’s not that she doesn’t know who Fitz is anymore, it’s that she doesn’t know who she is without him. She still isn’t sure what that means in the context of his confession, but the truth is she survived and succeeded on her own at Hydra and she developed friendships outside of him, and yet in the end all she’s learned is her life could be immeasurably fuller if he would only come back to her.

She remembers how lonely she was as a child, creating her own experiments in her own makeshift lab, sharing the results with her well-meaning but bewildered parents. She misses those days. You can’t understand true loneliness until you’ve met the person you never want to be without and lose them anyway. This is why she hates Ward; this is why she hates herself.

Jemma looks down at her hands, where she’s carved half-moons into the flesh of her palms, and breathes out slowly, flexing her fingers and thinking of the desert, of its barrenness and drought. Of the shallow roots she would form there, too shallow to entangle a man who simply wants to be free of her. She should be happy. Fitz is alive. Isn’t that all she had requested, in exchange for—but it doesn’t matter. There is nothing she wouldn’t have offered.    

She carefully fixes her makeup, surprised to see tears snaking down her cheeks. She cries too much now, for no discernable reason. After all, she’s happy.

++

She considers Bobbi’s words the entire ride over on the quinjet. Jemma excels at preparation, but as she runs through her speech it feels disjointed, confusing, false. She starts over. No, still wrong. She starts over. Okay, it’s the closing that’s imprecise. A realization startles her: She’s never done this before—she and Fitz had always been perfectly in sync. Jemma would barely form a thought before he was voicing the end of her sentence. He hasn’t been able to understand her for months, and that more than anything is what has completely unmoored her.

But if she’s being honest (and how can she be with him, if she’s not with herself?), Fitz’s ability to hide his feelings from her has to mean they weren’t ever as in sync as she’d believed.

No, that’s not—she starts over.

Mack leaves because their awkward silence is too much for him, and if she weren’t panicking about getting the sentences aligned correctly in her brain before she speaks (she’s never crammed for an exam before, not once), she would laugh. For years, people had found their conversations incomprehensible, had occasionally felt awkward in their presence, as if they were intruding. Now it’s their silence others can’t stand. But if she’s being honest (if she can be, if she tries), she wouldn’t laugh at all.

Fitz takes a deep breath, and she imagines she can see all the precious air he’s inhaling into his lungs, the oxygen binding to hemoglobin, rushing to his brain. The beauty of a system working unremittingly to keep him alive gives her the strength to start.

“I’d like to say something,” she begins.

“I’ve been thinking—” he says at the same time.

“Please let me go first,” she pleads, and he shakes his head, flapping his hands in a gesture she finds heartbreakingly familiar now. _See, I still know you_ , she yearns to, but would never, say.

“ _Fitz_ ,” she says, sharply and sternly and more forcefully than she’s spoken to him since—. Since.

He’s surprised enough that he gapes at her, meeting her eyes for the briefest of moments, but he can’t hold her gaze. Her face is a glossy mask, but beneath it she’s cracking because she has her opening and no script. Fitz, she thinks sadly, would know exactly how she feels.

“I didn’t-didn’t leave because of...because of what happened to you,” she falters. “I was making your recovery worse.”

His eyes jump back to hers; he’s cautious, ready to lash out like a wounded animal. It hurts to have forfeited the right to approach him when he’s like this.

“You were-weren’t, you weren’t making me worse. I _needed_ you. I needed your help. I couldn’t even t-t- _talk_ after you left.”

Jemma wets her lips, crossing her arms over her chest defensively before she realizes how it must look and consciously, awkwardly drops them to her sides. “I was making you worse, Fitz. You couldn’t see it, maybe our friends couldn’t see it, but I could. Your doctors could. You depended on me too much and your progress stalled. You wouldn’t even try talking when I was around; you let me talk for you. And then you would get frustrated at yourself for not getting better faster.”

“Well, I’m _sorry_ if I’m d-damaged and thought my _best friend_ might want to st-stick around to—”

“Fitz!” she snaps again, and he turns away, chastised. “I didn’t want to leave,” she confesses, softly, choking back down her fear. “Did you know, those months I was at Hydra were the longest we’ve been apart since we met?”

He sighs and then slides to the floor, drawing his legs up to his chest and curling his arms around his knees. “‘C-course I do.”

She doesn’t know whether to sit next to him. It seems like an intrusion, but she has missed him more than she can articulate so as a compromise she moves to crouch nearby, eye-level but too far away to touch. “I missed you,” she whispers. “I thought about you every day. I asked Coulson—”

He rests his forehead against his arms and doesn’t look at her. “But you l-lied. You told me you were gonna see your m-mum and your dad.”

“I know,” she says. “And I’m sorry, I really am. I thought...I thought it would be better if you weren’t worrying about me. Just concentrating on your recovery.”

Fitz snorts. “I always worry about you,” he admits, turning his face slightly towards her, his eyes bright and watery and oh so blue. She’s startled for a moment by the thought that his eyes might be the only thing in the world that will get her to love the ocean again.

“I’m sorry,” she repeats. “I just...I want you to know that it doesn’t matter to me if you’re different. All I wanted was my best friend back. Whatever that means now.”

He exhales slowly, rubbing a hand across his face. “Okay.”

Jemma frowns. “Okay?” She attempts to detect any underlying bitterness to his voice, but it’s impossible to hear over the treacherous hope thundering through her veins.

“Okay. Yeah. I-I missed you too. I know it’s diff-difficult, but we should try. And about the-the other thing, I understand...I mean, I never expected…”

“You never expected what?” She’s frustrated because they’re not as in-tune as they’d been even as teenagers. Jemma Simmons never takes steps back. But recovery isn’t a step back, she tries to tell herself.

“Guys, we gotta go!” Mack calls from where he’s reappeared at the entrance to the quinjet, and Fitz breathes a heavy sigh of relief. She resents that he’s still keeping his secrets, but when he stands up and offers a tremulous smile, a wave of solace washes over her, dizzying in its intensity.

 _The steps you take don’t need to be big_ , she reminds herself. _They just need to take you in the right direction_. And Fitz’s small smile has always been the right direction.

++

When it falls apart his arms are around her. It’s all falling apart it’s crashing down he’s trying to hold her together but she’s dying (they’re dying everyone is dying) his heartbeat is deafening against her ear it’s all falling apart and she remembers placing a hand to his chest in the hospital and learning his heart beats exactly in time with hers so she must still be alive it’s all—

++

She comes to his bunk late at night. When he closes the door behind her, she pushes him against it and kisses him harshly, broken and demanding. He kisses her back or maybe he just doesn’t stop her—until he does. Her face is red and blotchy, her eyes swollen because she hasn’t stopped crying since they found Trip in pieces.

“Please, Fitz,” she says, pushing against him again. “I want to feel something else.”

He wraps his arms around her tightly and places a kiss to the top of her head so gentle it makes her weep, but he doesn’t give her what she needs. She needs to know he’ll stay with her, always, and the only way she can prove it is if she holds him inside of her and keeps him safe.

Instead, he tucks her into his bed and starts to go, but she grabs his wrist, tracks his pulse through the soft skin. “Don’t leave me,” is what she assumes she says. Probably she says nothing.

He slides into bed beside her. She doesn’t try to kiss him again. But she holds onto his hand for hours, until her fingers are numb and the lifelines on their palms align at last.

++

When she wakes, Fitz is turned away from her and she’s wrapped around him like a vise. She’s surprised he can breathe. At the thought, she immediately lets go. She holds a hand up to his face, horrified, and calms down only slightly when she feels the light puff of air tickling her palm as he exhales.

Jemma has nightmares every night. There’s enough fodder in her brain to avoid reruns, but this seems to be a perennial favorite: Fitz is drowning, and despite her best efforts, she’s the one holding him under.

She kissed him last night. She kissed him and he didn’t really kiss her back and this fills her with embarrassment and shame. But his lips were surprisingly soft and the memory is enough to suffuse her with a burning longing she knows she’ll never be able to shake. She wants to ask Bobbi which part of the roller coaster she’s on, but she’s afraid she already has the answer: balanced precariously at the top of a malfunctioning ride, begging the operator to take a chance anyway because at this point there’s no other way down.

She wishes she could share this metaphor with Fitz, because he’s the romantic one and her jumbled attempts at explaining her own heart might amuse him. Because he’s always been, first and last and forever, her best friend, and who else could really understand what she means when she says she’s so very afraid to leap without him by her side?

Jemma can tell the moment he wakes. She can feel the way his muscles tense beneath her arms, how he shifts slightly to put more space between their bodies. She wants to cry because she’s terrified to lose him, but he’s just terrified of her.

“You don’t know what it would do to me. What it’s done to me,” she whispers, resting her forehead between his shoulder blades, tears pooling onto his shirt. He twists in her arms, facing her with an achingly confused expression.

“To lose you,” she admits. It’s hard to say, harder still to forget saying it to his comatose body.

Fitz bites his lip, blinking slowly. His eyelashes are incredibly long and the way they flutter against his cheeks causes a sharp twisting in her gut. She had never imagined love would be this painful. Was this how it felt for him? Is that why he chose death over staying with her in the medpod?

“You didn’t lose me,” he answers, and it’s his bewildered patience that wrecks her.

“I lose you every night,” she sobs.

“Jemma,” he says. Her name, over and over like a benediction. Maybe he doesn’t intend the first brush of his lips against her tear-stained cheeks, maybe it’s just an instinct to soothe. Maybe she doesn’t notice the way her hips cant towards his or how his warm hands press possessively into her skin or how the saltwater taste of him is the exposure therapy she’s been needing.

Or maybe when she slots her mouth against his, she realizes the person who defeated an ocean to win him back has always been strong enough to tell him, to say—

++

Jemma shouldn’t be happy. It’s the end of the world, again, and she has woken up wrapped around her best friend, again, unfinished conversations stuck along their bodies like seaweed. But she is. She is completely, ridiculously, unbelievably happy because she lost him and left him and yet somehow he has returned, safe in her arms. And she _knows_ what this is. She knows with a bone-deep certainty she had never thought herself capable of outside an exam hall.

A year from now—on Maveth, and then two years from now—in the Framework, and then a lifetime from now—falling to the floor before Mack can even say the words, she will wonder what she might have changed had she seen the future. This is where things splinter irrevocably; the point at which her subsequent heartbreak becomes infinite. If they are destined to lose each other, it will only hurt immeasurably more after a night spent in the afterglow of his fervent “I love you.”

And yet. One day, far away but sooner than she would have believed possible, she will look down at a sleeping baby in her arms, her husband playing on the floor with their toddler, and think suddenly of this moment, of waking up to a new, frightening, intoxicating future. And she will understand clearly, for the first time, that the only thing she could have told herself was: _Hold on. The ride has always been worth it._

For now, she holds on to him, giggling and slightly weepy, feeling her cheeks flush as he stirs next to her. She could take it all back; Fitz might even expect it. Last night was wonderful but unplanned, and the future is not predestined. She has always had a choice.

Jemma smiles at the thought, exhilarated by the idea of what she can create: an eternity of falling asleep next to Fitz, a home built on the foundation of his limbs tangled up in hers. She can choose to wake him every morning with a kiss, and she can choose to start today. She’s standing on a precipice without a safety net, but his hand is in hers because once he told her _you have to hold on to it okay? hold on tight_ as if she would ever let him go.

So she jumps, fearless and free.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Can't believe it took me this long to respond, sorry! Also, should've written this before s5 aired, then I could've avoided that reference to the finale. But I'm still depressed soooo here we are.


End file.
